You don't need an additionnal GPU. That's the whole point of AMD. These are very fine HTPCs under linux or windows.
10-30% improvement over Bay-trail D depending on benchmarks is fine. price should be similar. But 25W compared to 10W. It's big enough that I decided to go the bay trail route, but it's a very good offering nonetheless.

I don't think it is worthwhile putting a dedicated gnu in a system like this, however, it can be useful if you need the increased GPU power for other things than media playback.

Glad someone else started this discussion.

I am interested in this platform also. I wonder if they will have enough power to be a good HTPC?

But more importantly for my intended usage, would they have enough power to act as a HTPC with PVR capabilities(Either through WMC or XBMC with backend etc)? I am looking at creating a new HTPC with OTA recording capabilities, so with an always on htpc I would like to run with lower power consumption, would these chips be able to do that?

It will probably be difficult for your needs.
Playback should be fine for most things (also I'm no expert in the TV field) but if you need recording, transcoding, resizing, deinterlacing... thinkgs like that. then it will be difficult.

In other parts of this forum they talked a lot about the celeron 1007U and 1037U. These are 15W Ivy Bridge CPUs. They were 30-50% more powerfull than the bay trails D mentioned above and the guys talking about it were saying that they were the minimum for deinterlacing.

The AMD Athlon 5350 seems to readily outperform the J1900 BayTrail counterpart in many tasks. Also the 'Passmark' scores (grain of salt) is better than a celeron 1007u.

(2014-04-10 13:29)Aquarius Wrote: It will probably be difficult for your needs.
Playback should be fine for most things (also I'm no expert in the TV field) but if you need recording, transcoding, resizing, deinterlacing... thinkgs like that. then it will be difficult.

In other parts of this forum they talked a lot about the celeron 1007U and 1037U. These are 15W Ivy Bridge CPUs. They were 30-50% more powerfull than the bay trails D mentioned above and the guys talking about it were saying that they were the minimum for deinterlacing.

So AM1 APUs might not fit your needs.

Thanks for your reply.

I asked as I wasn't sure what was hardware accelerated and what wasn't in regards to pvr functionality. My experience is limited to media playback with a cpu about 1/6 the power of the Athlon 5350, but all the work such as resizing and deinterlacing is offloaded to a capable GPU. Also my last pc- OTA TV experience was using a P3, but I don't know the current requirements.

I ordered a Athlon 5150 and MSI AM1-I motherboard to test out. Newegg had a combo deal for only $75 for the pair. I am most excited though about the ASRock mini-ITX AM1 board that has a 19V input. These should perform very well for HTPC duties and even some very light gaming.

Recording takes almost no CPU and de-interlacing if offloaded to the GPU will be fine. There's no reason this platform unless it's buggy can't do pretty much everything HTPC except things like transcoding, gaming, like that.

But, that's why I bought one to see how it does and know for sure. It's also the only way I can know what cases it fits in. I am hoping the included CPU HSF is low-profile and not noisy. That's actually my biggest concern at the moment.

(2014-04-10 14:24)Dougie Fresh Wrote: I am most excited though about the ASRock mini-ITX AM1 board that has a 19V input.

Yes, that sounds good for passive configuration.

4 years ago I was looking for a mini-itx case that would have a integrated PSU and I came upon the Gigabyte T5140. It uses an external 65W power brick to the case and the mini-itx board is connected to that with a normal ATX plug. In my experience, the best of both worlds. You get to use normal ATX boards with a passive, externalised, power brick. I'm sure there are others, newer cases like that.

(2014-04-10 14:36)Aquarius Wrote: 4 years ago I was looking for a mini-itx case that would have a integrated PSU and I came upon the Gigabyte T5140. It uses an external 65W power brick to the case and the mini-itx board is connected to that with a normal ATX plug. In my experience, the best of both worlds. You get to use normal ATX boards with a passive, externalised, power brick. I'm sure there are others, newer cases like that.

All the cases I have are that configuration. The PSU is two parts: an internal fanless DC-DC powerboard and an external fanless AC adapter. It has a regular 20-pin ATX plug and they all fit mini-ITX desktop boards. They go all the way up to 150W. The only exception are the smallest of the smallest cases which don't have any PSU and need a picoPSU or a board with on-board DC-DC like the ASRock or a thin mini-ITX Intel board.

Anyone got there build up and running ? looking at replacing my ageing E350N with Athlon 5350 on a ASRock mini-ITX AM1 board using one of many power
bricks I have laid about .
Looking at running Win7 up front with frodo .